The Watcher Chronicles
by Doyle-sb4
Summary: AngelSpike. Andrew is back with a mission for Spike and Angel.


Title: The Watcher Chronicles  
  
Author: Doyle  
  
Pairing: Angel/Spike  
  
Rating: PG-13  
  
Disclaimer: Stuff belongs to Joss Whedon. Andrew's view re: Merry and Pippin is not mine g  
  
Notes: For aphedas who wanted an action-adventure type Angel/Andrew or Angel/Spike.  
  
There was that thing that people said, about everything having a silver lining. They'd lost Dana, and everybody thought they were evil, and Buffy didn't trust him any more, but – at least Andrew was gone.   
  
"And yet here you are, back again," Angel said, less than a week later. He'd been doing well. Pissed off rage down to acceptable levels, no worse than how he usually felt after an hour or two with Spike. Now he was holding a human by the throat and the great Angel/Angelus divide seemed more like a crack in a paving stone. "What do you want, Andrew?"  
  
He choked out something.  
  
"They can't actually talk if you've got them round the neck," Spike observed.  
  
Reluctantly, he loosened his hold. The boy slid the few feet down the wall, almost stumbling over his own feet. "Owww!" he complained, rubbing his neck. "I don't like being strangled. I have very delicate skin. Also eczema."  
  
"Just cut to the chase," Spike said. "Tell him what you told…" A tight look came across his face. Angel had caught Cordelia enough times, when a vision had gripped her. That look meant the owner was about to hit the ground.  
  
Spike didn't, quite, because Angel was beside him in a second, holding on to him as his legs gave out.  
  
"I told you you weren't ready," he said. "What the hell were you doing, leaving the hospital?"  
  
Spike pushed him away. "Sod off," he mumbled. "Don't need your help."  
  
Obviously it was Piss Angel Off Day and Harmony had lost the memo. "Fine. Go ahead and fall all over my office floor."  
  
"I will, then."  
  
"Good."  
  
"Good."  
  
He'd forgotten Andrew was even in the room until he said, "Spike, are you really okay? I had my appendix out when I was six, because it ruptured?" He seemed to make half his sentences sound like questions. Angel added it to the list of reasons to have him eaten. "I had to stay in the hospital a long time but it wasn't so bad because they let me have all the ice cream I wanted, unless that was the time when I was eight and I got my tonsils out…"  
  
"Andrew!" Spike snapped. Thank God, Angel thought. "Just shut up and tell Angel about the demon and don't tell me it's physically impossible to do both of those at once or I'll pull you through another wall."   
  
Angel could just about hear Andrew's heartbeat accelerate as Spike leaned in, poking him on the shoulder to emphasize his threat. Funny; there was no fear scent off him.  
  
"What demon?"  
  
Andrew self-importantly drew himself up, making Angel grit his teeth even as it stirred up a sad, distant pang for Wesley as he'd once been. "We at the Watchers' Council have been tracking a Hwleth demon here in California."  
  
"Nasty buggers," Spike said. "Not a lot of them around, but they're vicious. Fought one in Utah 'bout forty-odd years ago."  
  
Angel frowned. "What were you doing in Utah?"  
  
"Anyway," Andrew said, "The fell beast has gone to ground somewhere in Griffith Park."  
  
"Well," Angel said, settling back against his desk, "I guess you must be on your way to kill it right now. Good luck with that."  
  
Andrew whipped around to Spike to complain, "I told you he wouldn't want to help."  
  
Wait, Spike had wanted his help? Spike?   
  
"Can't your own people," the people who didn't trust them with one damaged girl, who wouldn't even return his calls, "deal with one demon?"  
  
Spike said, "Tricky things, Hwleths. Got those things. Like, uh, octopus ink." He snapped his fingers – or tried to. It ended up in a clumsy motion that left him staring at his hand in dismay, until he caught Angel looking at him with concern. "Defence mechanism," he finished, sounding fairly defensive himself. "Protective shield, about twenty feet wide. Nothing with a pulse gets over the threshold."  
  
"We don't have any vampires working for us," Andrew said. "Even heroic, noble, Blade-like vampires." His eyes trawled adoringly over Spike, who scowled. Angel would have smirked, except that Andrew turned back to him and gave him much the same look, for the split second before it was replaced with his usual suspicious scorn.  
  
Yeah, that was all he needed.  
  
"Okay," he hastily agreed. "Griffith Park? Give me an exact location and I'll kill it."  
  
"I'm coming too," Andrew and Spike said at once.  
  
Angel wondered if it would be a mark against him in the shanshu column if he had just one more little killing spree.  
  
--  
  
This was so unfair.  
  
Andrew kicked his heels resentfully against the chair. He hoped he left scuffmarks, too.   
  
There'd been a big fight about whether him and Spike could go along to kill the Hwleth. Andrew had tried pointing out that the two of them had already saved the world, not to mention the killer recon mission to that monastery, and that he had to go along so he could watch (from outside the defensive circle, of course) and record everything for Mr. Giles. Spike had talked over him, yelling how he was totally healed and that he'd seen one of these things before and that Angel was a -  
  
" '…poncing nancy-boy with a hair gel fetish'," he wrote. And after that Angel had said the thing about love poetry that Andrew hadn't understood, but he dutifully copied it into his notebook, word for word. He had a pretty good memory, he'd found, honed to a finely tuned instrument by years of memorizing Star Trek trivia and quotes from The Simpsons.  
  
Getting left behind sucked. Spike had gotten to go, finally, after he'd spent nearly a half hour shouting at Angel and getting yelled at back. Andrew had retreated to the couch and waited it out, and he didn't like people yelling, he never had, but when it was Angel and Spike doing it and they were really, really close together, the right in each other's faces kind of close, it was kind of… hot.  
  
That part didn't go down in his report.   
  
He checked his Babylon 5 wristwatch. They should be at the park by now, probably engaging the demon in bloody combat. Spike would have to stay back since Angel hadn't let him take a sword, claiming his hands weren't better yet and he'd maybe take Angel's head off by mistake (Andrew tried to remember if 'sodding tragedy' should have a g or a j). Angel would be there in the fray, a whirling Uma Thurman style slaughterhouse, with Spike anxiously watching from the sidelines as his brother-in-arms risked life and – well, not life. But risked a whole lot.  
  
They were just like Frodo and Sam, he sighed to himself. The true hero was the one who selflessly followed.   
  
He'd moved on to a happy post-ring Mount Doom scenario, Angel and Spike pasted over Elijah Wood and Sean Astin in his mental movie theatre, when one of Angel's lackeys tapped the open door.  
  
"You get stuck babysitting?" the man – Gunn, he remembered – asked.  
  
Pryce looked up from his own paperwork. "Have I done something to offend Angel, do you think?"  
  
You two won't even get a cameo in my report, Andrew thought. You're Merry and Pippin. Nobody cares about your story. Nobody even knows which one of you is which.   
  
--  
  
Angel wouldn't even let him drive. Not good enough to hold a sword, not good enough to grapple with a manual transmission.  
  
He was glad he'd 'forgotten' to mention the green ooze that blasted outward as a Hwleth corpse collapsed in on itself, and gladder that he'd been out of range.   
  
A glob of the goo slid down the arm of Angel's coat.  
  
"You want to get that dry-cleaned, mate," Spike said mildly. Playing it innocent was better for making one of his grandsire's pissy moods worse than going overboard with the glee. "Bitch to get out of leather. Leaves a stain."  
  
Angel hunched himself lower over the steering wheel, glaring straight out the windscreen.  
  
"Hey, look on the bright side. Least the Boy Wonder'll get off your back." He grinned. "Not that it's your back he wants to get onto."  
  
That got him a dark look, made far less threatening by the way his hair was plastered completely flat onto his head. Spike saw the point of all the gel, finally.   
  
"Funny, I could've sworn it was you he was hugging and pawing and drooling over."  
  
"What, jealous?" Spike stretched out comfortably. "Can't hardly blame the boy."  
  
"Yeah, 'cause you're such a…"  
  
"Stud? Irresistible piece of eye candy?"  
  
"In your most deluded dreams."  
  
The hair was reminding him of something. What was it? Oh, the good old days, that was it, before Angelus had discovered the love of hair products.  
  
Some nostalgic part of that memory, or maybe that masochistic streak of his, made him say, "Used to fancy me a bit yourself. As I recall."  
  
"I also used to like stalking young virgins and massacring whole families."  
  
Spike rubbed the fading red scar around his left wrist. Its twin circlet on the other arm itched. He didn't want to scratch it. Not with Angel here. That was practically admitting he wasn't as fine and dandy as he was making out.   
  
"Are your hands okay?" Completely neutral tone bordering on the disinterested, eyes locked onto the road.  
  
"Couldn't be better." He slumped into a sullen silence.  
  
"Like you weren't the one always following me around," Angel muttered.  
  
--  
  
"Did you kill it?" Andrew asked, scrambling to his feet, notebook and pen at the ready.  
  
"No thanks to Spike," Angel said, at the same time as Spike said, "Got in a lucky hit. Reckon the thing was on its last legs anyway."  
  
They both looked haggard and battle-weary. Well, Angel did, only mostly he just looked sticky. "Okay, tell me everything."  
  
A couple of beefy men in black uniforms filed in behind the two vampires. Angel waved them over to Andrew. "Get him out of here."  
  
"Hey," he complained.  
  
"And tell Giles, he wants something killed in my city, he comes to me first."  
  
Andrew knew when a battle was hopeless. It was one of the first tenets of The Art of War, or so he assumed from the highlights he'd gleaned from many seasons of sci-fi shows. He submitted to being escorted from the office by the security guards, the door slamming closed behind them.  
  
The soundproofing was pretty good. He could hear Angel and Spike shouting, but it was muffled. He turned back and, yep, they were arguing again, heads less than an inch apart as they screamed at each other and just as he was about to turn away Angel grabbed Spike's shoulders and kissed him, and they broke apart and yelled some more, and Spike pulled Angel down by his coat, and he didn't even look like he minded that it was all goopy.  
  
This was cooler than the first four times he'd seen Pellenor Fields, cooler than the limited edition Han Solo action figure Dawn had got him for Christmas, cooler than when he'd gone to LA with Jonathan on spring break and they saw Scott Bakula in Taco Bell.  
  
Still locked together, Angel and Spike did a sideways shuffle over to the window. The blinds slid down, hiding them from view.  
  
"All your bases are belong to us," Andrew whispered triumphantly as the security guards hustled him into the elevator.  
  
END 


End file.
